Bilingual Ed Hasn't Done The Job, So Why Do Schools Continue It?
Ron Unz is on the road again. The California businessman led successful ballot drives against bilingual education in his home state in 1998 and Arizona in 2000. Earlier this year, he helped start an anti-bilingual initiative in Colorado. Just this month he was in Massachusetts, kicking off a campaign there. Sounds like a lot of work to get rid of a program that doesn't work and defies common sense. If bilingual education does anything, it's to keep non-English-speaking students from moving into the mainstream. Otherwise, its record is what you'd expect from teaching kids mostly in their native languages and then somehow expecting them to learn English without using it much in class. With so little going for it, bilingual ed should have been gone years ago. Instead, it hangs on. And activists like Unz have to go directly to the voters, where possible, to weaken its hold. Voters Are Heard Given the choice, voters have overwhelmingly voted to replace bilingual ed with programs aimed at teaching English quickly. But Unz is running out of states where such ballot-box verdicts are possible. New York, Illinois and Texas, all with big limited-English populations and bilingual programs, don't have an initiative process. And state lawmakers shy away from this "ethnically charged issue," he says. "I think there is close to zero chance of anything happening in the legislative process." Even when lawmakers, school boards or voters do act, reform doesn't always follow. New York City's school board voted in February to let parents choose a more English-intensive program as an alternative to bilingual. (This was after a study showed only 45% of students who entered the bilingual programs in middle school and 15% who entered in high school knew English well enough to leave the program during their school years.) But New York's overhaul can't go very far, because the city remains under a 1974 consent decree in which it agreed to provide native-language instruction. California's Mixed Success In California, some school districts have been quicker than others to shift students into structured immersion, the mostly-English method prescribed by the 1998 initiative, Proposition 227. In Oakland, for instance, some 40% of immigrant students were granted waivers from immersion (which 227 allows) and stayed in the dual-language track. Oakland has picked up the pace of teaching English, but only after the state threatened to withhold funds because only 1% of Oakland's limited-English students were graduating each year into English-only classes. At the other extreme, schools in the Southern California city of Oceanside switched enthusiastically to immersion and got dramatic results. Superintendent Ken Noonan, a longtime bilingual booster, totally changed his mind after seeing how fast kids learned English with immersion. But later the state criticized the district for granting too few waivers from the immersion program. So the bilingual battle is far from over in California, while in most other states it hasn't even been joined. Meanwhile, Washington is mostly an onlooker. President Bush is trying to rid federal law of its pro-bilingual tilt. His education reforms would scrap the rule that 75% of federal funds for limited-English students go toward native-language instruction. But that may not help much when most states seem inclined to keep bilingual instruction as it is. Washington's Indifference The House, in its version of the Bush plan, has added some tougher provisions. It wants to make sure that limited-English students take standardized tests in English after three years, for instance. But anything really aggressive may be cut in conference. The Senate version leaves the bilingual program largely intact, with more money to spend. Bush himself is hardly an anti-bilingual crusader. "I will reject the English-only movement," he told a Hispanic journalists' group during the campaign. This may be good politics for Republicans who want to connect with Hispanics and come back from the dead in California. But by not pushing harder to make sure all students learn English, they're leaving too much power in the hands of local level pro-bilingual activists and politicians. There is some good news, though. Many students technically qualified for native-language instruction avoid it, though more through accident than design. It may be that schools or school districts have too few so-called Limited English-proficient, or LEP, students to fill a class. So they stay with English-speaking pupils, and before long learn the language. Getting Around Rules Even if they stay in the bilingual program, teachers may teach them in English anyway, just in case there aren't enough students for the following year. "It's getting harder and harder to form these bilingual classrooms," says Christine Rossell, a Boston University political scientist and a critic of bilingual ed. She sees a lot of such "fake bilingual" going on. But Spanish-speaking children, who make up the majority of LEP students, often aren't so lucky. If they go to a school with plenty of other Spanish-speaking children and teachers who take bilingual dogma seriously, they get a triple dose of linguistic isolation: little English either in the classroom, at home or on the playground. They are the ones who may need immersion the most. Given current trends, their numbers are bound to rise. The lucky ones will land in schools that believe in teaching English and are free to do so. But bilingual education is staying alive because too many politicians believe (or are afraid to deny publicly) that native-language teaching is something owed to non-English speakers, both as a civil right and way of showing respect. As long as this is true, many more children will lose maybe their only chance to learn what they must know to join fully in American life. |